What’s Your Favorite Animal? by Eric Carle and Friends

One of my favorite things in the world is children’s books illustrations. (I think I could decorate my house in them!) What’s Your Favorite Animal? is especially fun to me because it offers the reader an opportunity to see various authors’ and illustrators’ styles alongside each other. Itis a smorgasbord of fun answers to the titular question, all written and illustrated by Eric Carle and a baker’s dozen other famous children’s authors/illustrators: Nick Bruel, Lucy Cousins, Susan Jeffers, Steven Kellogg, Jon Klassen, Tom Lichtenheld, Peter McCarty, Chris Raschka, Peter Sís, Lane Smith, Erin Stead, Rosemary Wells, and Mo Willems. The authors’ responses vary from personal stories (Carle had a stringbean stealing cat!) to poetic (Lichtenheld offers a humorous poem about giraffes) to fantastical (Willems loves the Amazonian Neotropical Lower River Tink Tink). My personal favorites are Erin Stead’s penguins (because I love her illustrations just a little bit ) and Lane Smith’s elephant complete with top hat and toothy grin. Think of this as a fun conversation with some of your favorite authors/illustrators. A bonus is that all royalties from the book are donated to The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, a place I surely must visit before I die! Highly Recommended. (Henry Holt, 2014)